]]>Privacy-wary consumers can take some comfort in the settings tab of our smartphones or browsers, which allow us to tell a device not to track our location or monitor what we are reading. But what can they do when the internet-connected device is inside their body or mounted on a city lamp-post?

“For many of these devices, there’s no natural user interface…it’s a design challenge,” Nicole Wong, the former deputy CTO at the White House, said at Gigaom’s Structure Connect conference in San Francisco Tuesday.

According to Wong, the internet of things era will pose privacy challenges that are even more daunting than those posed by the internet.

This is not because many new internet-connected objects lack a privacy settings button, but because they will start to pull all sorts of people — even those who aren’t on the internet in the first place — into connected databases through photo tagging and other sensor features.

Many people for now take comfort in the fact that whoever controls all those sensors — the government, say, or certain companies — won’t be bothered to snoop into their boring little lives, but that could change. As more sensors generate more data, the fear of coming under the “eye of Sauron” will likely increase, said Jay Stanley of the ACLU.

The worst case scenario, according to Stanley, is that people will come to fear “judgment by machines” and monitor their own behavior accordingly.

He added that the situation could become more gloomy yet in light of shaky protections. (Specifically, he pointed to the so-called “third party doctrine,” which eliminates Fourth Amendment privacy protections in the event that a person freely gives private records to someone else — perhaps by sharing the activities they perform at home with a connected appliance controlled by a third-party company).

So does privacy stand a chance? Can we realistically expect to gain privacy over the internet of things, when we seem unable to do so with the internet?

According to Richard Cornish, the head of IOT at XChanging, answers can be found by looking to places like Germany, which provide models of government working with industry to develop iterative regulations. One example he cited is a highway truck monitoring system that tracked drivers’ mileage, but did not also disclose their location.

Finally, the ACLU’s Stanley argued that we might be on the cusp of a new level of awareness, similar to what occurred with environmental concerns, which many people once dismissed.

“In 1972, ecology was just a fad. [Now], some companies are betting against privacy, that it will go away. That’s not a good bet,” he said, adding, “there’s a core amount of privacy that people will not give up.”

]]>Todd Park, one of the officials tied to the disastrous rollout of the Obama Administration’s health care website, is reportedly leaving his job as Chief Technology Officer by the end of the year.

According to a report in Fortune, multiple sources say that Park will be moving to Silicon Valley with his family by the end of the year, but that he will continue to work on White House related projects from there.

Park, who co-founded two healthcare IT companies, joined the White House as chief technology officer for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2009. He was promoted to CTO for the United States in 2012, where he advised President Obama, including during the botched launch of healthcare.gov in October of last year.

Fortune said the White House, which did not comment on Park’s departure, is looking for a successor from the ranks of Google, LinkedIn and Twitter.

News of Park moving on comes one week after his deputy CTO, privacy expert, Nicole Wong, likewise announced her departure.

]]>Nicole Wong, a former top lawyer at Google and Twitter, left the White House last week after working on privacy and big data issues for a little over a year. Her official title was “deputy chief technology officer” but, for all intents and purposes, Wong was the closest thing the Obama administration had to a privacy officer.

“Nicole is an incredibly talented and insightful leader, who has made major contributions to big data, privacy and Internet policy during her time at the White House,” said chief technology officer Todd Park in a statement to the Washington Post about Wong’s departure.

Her exit also touched off a Twitter debate about who is best qualified to succeed her. It started with the ACLU’s head technologist, Chris Soghoia:

I agree with Mclaughlin, an ex-Googler who is now an entrepreneur-in-residence with Betaworks, that there’s no reason to think a lawyer doesn’t have the tech chops to be a privacy advocate. But I also wonder if the top privacy position is a job for wonks in the first place.

Instead, the job might be better suited for someone who can explain online privacy issues to the average American, including the inherent trade-off that lies at the heart of the consumer internet: free services in exchange for personal data. That trade was explained beautifully in the Atlantic last week by pop-up ad inventor Ethan Zuckerman, who described the ad-based business model as the “original sin of the internet” and pleaded for a better way — perhaps one in which consumers pay Pinterest or Facebook $5 a month to keep the companies away from their personal information.

This idea of paying for privacy is not new or complicated, but the White House or Wong have yet to broach it directly. Indeed, Wong’s most tangible achievement was as a co-author of a “big data” report published this spring — a worthy enough initiative, but not one that has done anything to change the privacy protections of the average person.

In choosing Wong’s successor, the White House may not need to find the best technologist or tech lawyer in the country. Instead, the Administration should look for someone with a high public profile capable of broadening the debate beyond the recondite circles of tech policy, and into the language of ordinary internet users. It’s perhaps a long-shot but, in the age of Facebook and YouTube, a well-known social media personality may be as capable of promoting privacy for the Administration as a tech or legal expert:

Russian hackers have stolen over a billion passwords. Can one of them send me my login info for SeamlessWeb?

]]>The Obama Administration is appealing to technology workers, business leaders and civil society advocates to attend public workshops about how companies use consumer data. The workshops will take place at various universities in the coming months, with the first one titled “Big Data Privacy: Advancing the State of the Art in Technology and Practice.”

Nicole Wong, a White House adviser and former Google lawyer, announced the events on Monday in a blog post, which states that the first workshop will be held March 3 at MIT. Follow-up events will take place at the University of California, Berkley, and New York University.

The announcement comes a month after the White House appointed a special adviser to produce a report about companies and consumer data. The New York Times, describing the issue as “A Second Front in the Privacy Wars” this weekend urged the White House to treat the adviser’s investigation as an occasion to propose new laws for people to control their data.

Meanwhile, on March 19 at Gigaom’s Structure Data conference, I’ll be speaking with FTC Commissioner Julie Brill about whether the government can address the privacy implications of big data while at the same time encouraging its commercial and scientific potential. I’m hoping these talks will help pave the way for more sophisticated public and media conversations about consumer data — right now, the discourse is too often dominated by privacy panic headlines or misinformation. 2014 could be the year we get past that.

]]>The Obama Administration has reportedly selected Nicole Wong, who has worked as a senior lawyer for both Google and Twitter, to be a privacy adviser. Wong has a reputation in the tech and legal community for defending online freedom.

The appointment was first reported by CNET, which stated that Wong would be “chief privacy officer;” later reports describe the post as “senior advisor” to United States CTO Todd Park.

and has yet to be confirmed, comes at a time of growing public concern over data collection tools that scour everything from smartphones to shopping records, and make it easy for companies and governments to collect information about individuals.

The Obama Administration’s decision to appoint Wong may therefore represent an attempt by the government to find new ways to balance the power of data with preserving liberty and privacy.

During her time at Google, Wong fought the governments of Turkey and Pakistan over YouTube censorship, and she has also worked with The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a respected cyber-advocacy group.

Wong’s appointment also comes at a time when Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been calling attention to the growing threat of governments using Western technology to spy on and oppress their citizens.

Wong, who joined Twitter last November, is the second long-time Google lawyer to be hired by the White House in recent months. The Administration recently hired former Googler Michelle Lee to head the troubled Patent Office.

While such moves are hardly uncommon in the tech sector, Wong’s departure comes amidst what is starting to look like a mini-exodus from Google to Twitter. She joins general counsel Alex Macgillivray and other former Google lawyers Ben Lee and Bakari Brock. Meanwhile, Gabriel Stricker, Karen Wickre and Jim Prosser have recently joined Carolyn Penner on the communications team.